Case Study  /  Sydney Water

The Client

Sydney Water is Australia’s largest water utility.

Their area of operations covers 12,700 km2 and includes Sydney, the Illawarra and the Blue Mountains regions.

Their Story

With over 3,200 staff, recruitment is a big focus for Sydney Water. However, they were finding that their Job Description documents were lacking in
consistency and impeding productivity.

Internal challenges included experiencing double ups of similar roles and a lack of shared understanding around how to write job descriptions properly. They needed a holistic solution…. fast.

The Ideaseed Difference

At Ideaseed, we have unlocked the potential of a well-designed template. Not only do your documents look amazing, but we can also create templates that are functional and do a lot of hard work for you.

Our Service

We designed and built a new template system to assist Sydney Water managers compile Job Descriptions and Titles consistently and effectively in Microsoft Office.

MS OFFICE JOB DESCRIPTION FORMS

The Design – We designed the layout of the Job Description forms into a questionnaire type format, which included visible instructions on how to complete a job description correctly.

The Templates – We created 1 master template, which incorporated fields for users to enter comprehensive detail about a job, accountabilities, tasks, expectations etc. Instructional text prompted authors to include relevant information pertinent to the role and dropdown menus aided in providing consistency across job titles. Once completed, the instructions could be removed at a click of a button, or reinstated at any time.

A thumbnail version could also be generated which displayed 3 positions together. This assisted managers cross-referencing roles for similar jobs and also provided visibility on team structures.

Our job description templates were a huge success for the staff involved in hiring. Simple adjustments to consistency, look and feel positively impacted the hiring process. The system of hiring became clear once a lot of the processes were integrated into a single document. It became clear who was recruiting certain positions at certain times, and what those positions were. Individuals were able to focus on hiring the perfect candidate, rather than updating hard-to-use documents. Productivity improved as job descriptions and specifications were clearer and teams communicated and manage workflow better. Across the company, job titles were easily sorted into ‘job families’ and made searchable according to easy-to-use keywords. Once hired, candidates who were grouped together could now be trained, reviewed and evaluated together. After the templates went live there were no more double ups and their hiring process became much more streamlined. Sydney Water has beautiful, branded Job Description templates, and a functional and user-friendly system that allows them to recruit with ease.